Around 2011, I traveled to Paris for work reasons. At least one of the interviews I had to do gave me great expectations, so, in a bit of intrigue, I bought a new digital recorder. My son was three years old at the time; This trip also meant that for the first time we would be far from each other, very far, for several days.
The first use I gave the brand new little recorder was to record a child’s voice. “Tell me something,” I said to the little boy, who of course didn’t understand anything that was being played at that moment. “What?” he replied. And that “What?” and some of the giggling that followed was recorded and remained that way, untouchable, priority and privileged over the archives of interviews that would accumulate during the press tour.
Every day at the end of the day I would click on the first file and hear the “What?” said between laughter and something warmed my heart.
Only now, a few years later, did I find words to explain in more detail what was happening each time I returned to that little recording.
“The voice touches me,” notes the writer Ryoko Sekiguchi (Tokyo, 1970). the exquisite essay The shadow voice, published by Periferica. It also suggests that the voice is “caressing.” Sekiguchi brings a tactile quality to what is intended to be a pure and intangible vibration and sound experience. And most importantly, the author speaks not of the ordinary voices that populate or clutter everyday life, but of extraordinary voices: those recorded by another technological device and, when heard again, enter a unique temporal territory. There is a distance between the moment they are recorded and the moment they are heard. When the “Play” button (or its digital version) is pressed, a tiny part of the past bursts in and breaks temporal linearity. The voice speaks to us from its own presence; It caresses us.
Of course there The shadow voice Sekiguchi does not think in such tiny temporal dimensions as a five-day trip, nor in the voices of those who will follow us, quite the opposite. The pulse of her essay, the thread that comes and goes as it weaves, is his.to the physical, permanent and distant absence of a grandparentand the not at all ethereal presence of his voice in certain recordings. However, some of his insights, the subtle way in which he analyzes a phenomenon that is more than just sensual in nature, led me directly to what I had experienced years ago and which every time I heard it again – the recording remains saved on my PC – the voice of my young son: a journey through time, a treasure, a moment from his early childhood in which, as Sekiguchi suggests, the properties of sound pass into the present, although they come from a time already past.
The person whose voice accompanied me every day of an unforgettable press trip is saying goodbye to secondary school these weeks and is preparing to soon come of age. I continue reading Sekiguchi in another book, Nagori. Nostalgia for the season that is coming to an endinvestigate something like this Saudade Japanese: an emotion where connection, nostalgia and temporality intertwine. “The heart that experiences Nagori “He is generous, if not courageous: he is not afraid to indulge in the small, insignificant things, not necessarily dramatic, but fragile and delicate, that make up our lives,” the author writes.
I am not an Oriental and do not think I have such a heart; But in every child who makes his way in this world there is something too unique, fragile and delicate. And it is an honor that life gives you to accompany him.
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